Kinect Hacked, Adafruit Bounty Won

scharkalvin writes "Adafruit has announced a winner to their bounty for an open source driver for the MS Kinect. From the article: 'We have verified that it works and have a screenshot from another member in the hacking community (thanks qdot!) who was also able to use the code. Congrats to Hector! He's running all this on a Linux laptop (his code works with OpenGL) and doesn't even have an Xbox!'" We talked about Adafruit's bounty yesterday.

Comments

Tampering!

[Sloppy]

Making stuff work is a crime.

Re:Tampering!

[Kell Bengal]

The very term Microsoft used, "product tampering", sent chills down my spine. They weren't even talking about replacing aspirin with cyanide, but words like 'tampering' (and implications about getting law enforcement involved) certainly make it sound like that. We're talking about the stuff people themselves actually own. It's astonishing to think that their rhetoric extends so far.

Re:Tampering!

[MoonBuggy]

What I find strangest is that the PR people at MS still don't seem to get this: spouting a lot of inflammatory nonsense about the Kinect being "tamper-resistant" and the like will piss off the geeks no end, and the non-geeks don't care either way (unless someone comes out with a nicely packaged piece of software that uses the PC interface, I guess). As it stands, we're triumphantly saying "fuck you, evil corporation" and the company that sponsored this is adding a further donation to the EFF to support the good work they do in keeping this stuff legal. The net result for MS is bad publicity with geeks, no impact with the majority of the market, and an open source driver for their device within a few days of its release. I suppose if they'd had any hope of blocking the production of the driver then the bad blood may have served some purpose, but as it stands I'd say they really, really need to fire some people in marketing if they couldn't predict that chain of events. I'm genuinely a little surprised that MS didn't know better.

If they'd just looked at pretty much any similar example in history to see that the open driver was inevitable, they could've played it in such a manner that they distanced themselves from supporting or condoning it, but congratulated the community for their innovation.

Re:Tampering!

[Dunbal]

Making stuff work is a crime.

      Only in the land of the free. In other "less free" places it's not a crime. Yet.

Re:Tampering!

[retchdog]

Of course they can't do anything about the amateur hackers, but I don't think that's the point. It's in their interest to make threatening announcements like this so that companies don't make a business out of poaching Kinects and rebadging/repurposing them essentially on Microsoft's dime. The point is to have a chilling effect on markets, not individuals directly. This isn't to say that this is a good or bad thing (let alone whether it's actually effective), but I suspect that amateur hardware hackers don't really significantly change the equation.

Of course the line between business and individual is blurry. Also, occasionally, a totally-amateur group gets whacked. I'd wager that this is mostly "mission creep", for example some overzealous newly-promoted True Believer looking for brownie points.

Re:Tampering!

[westlake]

They are likely pissed because Microsoft is likely still in the "We are subsidizing this hardware to ensure a market footprint for the XBox" mode and every Kinetic sold today that isn't used to play Gears of Violence is money out of their pocket with zero 'return'.

The Air Force had plans to build an HPC cluster using about 2,500 PS3s plus spares. Air Force Unhappy With Removal of Linux from PS3

That sort of thing takes a lot of product off retail shelves and it cannibalizes sales of your own HPC product.

Exit the OtherOS.

That lesson can't have been lost on Microsoft -- or anyone else in this business.

Re:Tampering!

[marcansoft]

The box of my Kinect actually said, and I quote: Requires acceptance of software license agreement available in manual and at: www.xbox.com/sla. You accept by using the Kinect Sensor and your Xbox 360.

It's a good thing I never used my Kinect Sensor with my Xbox 360 since I don't own an Xbox 360 :)

Re:Tampering!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

There is another possible consideration: the producer of the technology.

Primesense created, presumably holds patents on, and did the reference design for, the "Kinect" camera/IR projector range mapping stuff. MS didn't buy them, they just bought/licenced enough of their stuff to produce Kinect hardware.

It is quite possible that Primesense also sells one or more much expensive motion capture solutions/SDKs/whatever based on the same technology; but agreed to give MS a sweet deal, in $/unit terms, because of the number of units expected to sell.

If the Kinect becomes generally useful, with independently produced drivers, anybody will be able to buy an instance of PrimeSense's fancy tech for $150 at any gamestop.

Consider an example from the old days: the first "Airport" cards were actually just rebadged Lucent gear; but with the pins deliberately switched around so that they would be incompatible with a PCMCIA slot. The Lucent branded equivalents were more expensive; but worked with normal PCMCIA slots. Obviously Lucent wasn't taking a loss on the "airport" cards; but they were having it both ways: sell a bunch of units to well-heeled consumers via Apple; but don't cannibalize the deep-pocketed connected enterprise market, thanks to deliberate incompatibility. There could be something similar going on here.

Re:Tampering!

[Nursie]

"If the hacker only released a driver that works without altering the Kinect module in any way, MS can say what they want but they don't have much legal standing."

Why the hell would they have any standing if he did alter it? It belongs to him, not MS!

Hell, he could pull it apart, rewire it, reflash things...

What the hell happened to I bought it, it's mine ?? If I want to use it as a doorstop I will, if I figure out a way to cannibalise a sensor in it for some other purpose, I will. If I want to paint it green and shove it up my arse, I will.

FFS what's wrong with this planet?

Microsoft Wanted it that way

[Master Moose]

"Using a linux laptop". . Now every geek that has avoided Microsoft and their products like the plaugue will be rushing out and buying Kinect controllers. .

Step One: Create a toy that will entise the Open Source crowd
Step Two: Wait for some one to get it to work on their linux box
Step Three: watch all the geeks and hobyists buy said toy
Step Four: Profit

Hacking is good for business.

Re:Microsoft Wanted it that way

[cobrausn]

And all the sweeter, Microsoft said 'No'. And we all know how we geeks and open source guys are when told 'No'. They will take special joy in paying Microsoft 150 bucks to buy a Kinect and hack it for hobby projects..

Re:Hey, congrats

[erroneus]

Wow, you didn't even watch the video. Well, it apparently knows depth/distance among other sensory data. Robotics applications should be obvious (as also stated in the video) but I'm sure there are pornographic uses as well.

Re:Hey, congrats

[marcansoft]

Measure depth. And capture 4-channel audio with spatial location and echo cancellation (unconfirmed but likely). It also moves up and down and has an accelerometer. People are mostly interested in the depth thing, though.

Re:Kinect Tamper-Resistance

[SharpFang]

I guess the problem might be replacing Kinect with a different device presenting itself as Kinect to XBox. This way you'd gain unfair advantage in online games - where your fitness, physical condition and body momentum would restrict you normally, you could use, say, a key to deliver lightning fast kicks, or duck to the ground faster than gravitational acceleration would normally let you.

Re:Here come the patent threats...

[IKnwThePiecesFt]

Or Microsoft won't do anything to stop this since they really don't care.